WIDOW (8 page)

Kay also needed another place to live. She worked out like crazy, every day after work until eight or nine at night. She had one pair of cheap black Spandex pants and top that she bought at the local Woolworth's store. She had to wash them out every night in the hall sink at the boarding house, then hang them in the window of her room to dry overnight. After a month she had saved two hundred dollars toward the purchase of the car, and the muscle tone was coming back in her arms and legs. She stood five-foot-six, weighed a hundred and twenty. Her waist needed a little work, had to get those inches off, so she switched from sandwiches to salads and cups of yogurt. She still had to have her hair cut and styled.

Every night when she returned to her depressing room with the peeling cabbage-rose wallpaper and the veneered chest of drawers, she stood looking at herself critically in the strip of mirror nailed to the closet door. With the overhead light on, she examined her face for telltale signs of aging. No wrinkles. No deep crease lines yet. She was blessed with good bone structure that would shield her from looking her age for a few years to come. Her hair was thick and lush, but she worked at it, brushing the shoulder-length tresses a hundred times every night before bed. She washed it with beer and lemon. She used the best conditioners. It was beginning to shine like wet slate rock, and have a bounce of health when she flung her head.

She sucked in her little round tummy and sighed with despair. Had to get that flat again. Do more sit-ups and bend-overs. Her buttocks had not sagged, driven by gravity earthward—not yet. They rode high without leaving a smooth line sloping to her thighs. She soaked her feet in Epsom salts, rubbed lotion into them, trimmed her nails. She couldn't do much about her hands yet. At any time when they weren't working inside rubber gloves with cleaning solutions, she found them slipping into her mouth where she gnawed at the stubby nails. Maybe if she dipped her fingertips in Tabasco sauce? It was a thought. If that didn't work, she would simply go to a salon and have them put nail-wraps on.

She had to be perfect. She could not, would not, dared not be a maid the rest of her life. She could not continue seeing Andrew—or any other male children—who tore at her heart, and dazed her with fresh sorrow every time she looked at them. It would kill her. Or cause her to kill someone else.

It was frightening and awesome in its intensity, but she had trouble being around men now. It had started with the job, the same as her reaction to the children. When there was a man in the house, she fought an urge to jump him, to wrestle him to the floor, and plunge a knife through his heart. Any man, it didn't matter, but usually she felt this sudden craving to destroy when the man was a father of small children. She had less animosity toward the father of the teenagers in the house where she cleaned once a week.

But still it was there, that feeling of losing something that held the world in check, losing it to the point that she might pick up something and hurl it or smash it . . . or stab it clear through flesh and bone.

It was crazy, she knew that. But it made perfect sense at the same time. Fathers were irresponsible. They never loved their children as much as mothers did. They were stick figures who moved through a family with the role pulled over their heads, but not their hearts. They could not be trusted. They might do something irredeemable at any moment. Kay suspected all of them of child abuse or incest or hidden motives aimed toward children that involved sexual gratification or violence.

Once she stood on the stairway leading down from the balcony in Andrew's house and saw his father enter, a briefcase tucked under one arm. He scooped little Andrew up into his free arm and laughed in his face. She stood stock-still, her breath caught tight as if inside a steel cage, while she watched the father carry the boy through to the living room sofa and dump him unceremoniously into the cushions. Andrew laughed, thrilled, but Kay knew in his heart he must have been terrified. So high up! Such a long drop! Such a terrible hazard to endure! What if he had fallen from his father's arms onto the parquet floor and busted open his skull? What if he had rolled from the cushions and fallen into the sharp glass corner of the end table?

That father was irresponsible and unheeding of his son's safety. Finally, Kay took a deep breath and walked down the stairs one at a time, watching her step, keeping her eyes from the now-tousling father and son in their act of play. She moved past a sideboard where her fingers reached out and slid along a silver candelabra, on to the base of a thick-necked pottery vase painted with winding green vines. She paused, listening to the sounds behind her, the laughter and giggling, but there were possibilities those sounds could change to screams of slaughter. She wanted to yell, “DON'T TRUST HIM, ANDREW! HE MIGHT KILL YOU! HE'S SO BIG AND STRONG, HE MIGHT HURT YOU! RUN FROM HIM WHILE YOU HAVE THE CHANCE!”

As she stood quietly, fingers brushing the vase, the father took up Andrew again and marched past her into the kitchen. In passing he said, “Hello, Kay, how are you today?” Then he said to his son, “Let's get a bowl of ice cream, whatta you say, champ? You won't tell Mom, will you?”

Kay turned her back, whipping around so fast her black taffeta skirt swished against her thighs. She ran to the hall closet and grabbed her purse, snatched the maid's silly white hat from her hair, and was out the door on her way home without saying goodbye.

She worked harder and harder at the health club. They told her she was going to pay, she was pushing too hard, too fast, but she didn't care. It felt good to have pain, to lose herself in it. At night she lay on top of the sheets and stared at the cracked ceiling overhead stippled with shadows from the streetlights. Her back and stomach hurt, her legs, and shoulders, her neck and arms. But she was looking good. Better than she had in ten years. No one would ever know she had been the mother of two children.

No one would ever have guessed.

~*~

Mitchell Samson walked into the Hot Spot at a quarter after ten on a Saturday night when the place was packed and jumping. He found an empty table close to the men's room. He ordered the Irish coffee and turned his attention to the stage. He'd never seen the place this lively. What the hell could be the new attraction? She must be a knockout.

Not the girl on stage. That was Babycakes and the regulars knew her. Great and sexy, but no Jezebel.

He scanned the room and gauged the temperature. It was pretty steamy, and rising. Guys were after the girls who served the tables. “Wanna go out with me after this joint closes? Want to make some money, honey? Want to make it with a real man?” All the old lines, all the old brush-offs. The dancers had to wait on the customers between gigs and they had their hands full tonight.

He turned his gaze back to Babycakes who was winding up her dance. He hadn't noticed a new girl advertised on the posters in the glass cases outside the club. It had to be that, though. This place never pulled such a crowd, even on a Saturday night. Maybe she was so new they hadn't done any publicity photos yet. Could be.

Interesting. Word had spread along the street fast. He was in here just the week before and it was deader than roadkill.

Babycakes walked off stage with her tits swinging, her shoulders squared, and her G-string riding high. Mitchell admired her bravado in the face of whatever young woman had come along to draw the crowd. He put his hands together to clap for her loud and hard. The crowd joined in. Good. The girl deserved some appreciation, that was obvious.

Could his favorite, Jezebel, have made it word-of-mouth and drawn this mob? Is that who was about to part the curtains and mesmerize them the way she had him? That rankled. She was his devotion. He didn't much want to share her.

A new song by Prince came over the music system and the men took a collective breath and held it. Mitchell had his cup of Irish halfway to his lips when she walked down the runway like Queen Cleopatra taking her place before her subjects. Walked. She didn't dance out. She didn't slink. She didn't vamp. The platter-player said, “Gentlemen, we are proud to give you SHADOW, the sensation of the nation, the dark side of the wild side. Only the Shadow knows which way the wayward wind blows . . .”

Mitchell lowered the cup to the table with a shaky hand. He checked to see if his mouth was hanging open and it was. He shut it with a snap, his eyes glued to the stage.

Shadow did it all wrong and it worked anyway. It worked like gangbusters. The men who had come to see her, even those who were now drunk, didn't pull any stunts. They might have been statues, all turned to stone and gone to heaven. Faces softened, eyes glistened, jaws went slack, and eighty male heartbeats drummed as one, in love. Or lust. Or both.

She was a dark doll. She moved just slightly to the music, and she never looked at the audience. She kept her long lashes down cast. Her hands roved over breasts and waist, slid down hips and thighs. She took the center pole as if it were a lover, while men ground their teeth and drew their muscles tight to keep from leaping onto the stage to carry her away. Shadow might have been alone in her own bedroom thinking the most exquisitely private, sensuous thoughts for all the attention she gave the room full of men.

Mitchell couldn't believe his eyes. Her loveliness was something absolute and indisputable. She was a goddess, something come to life from myth. She was a queen, not flesh and blood. She had the movements, smooth but careful, that made the men lean forward toward her. She was of medium height, but not small, perfectly proportioned, the breasts behind the veil of pink nylon round and tilted, the nipples shockingly large. Skin the color of lightly stained birch, flawless, smooth, reflecting a soft sheen like the finest polished wood.

He watched her long hair sway, the black color so deep it could mirror a face from its surface. He watched her while she ignored the room, and when the song, a long one, drowned in its last note with a wail from Prince, she vanished, the curtains trembling from her passage through them.

Mitchell blinked. He looked around at the other entranced men. They came to their feet and a thunder rose from their stomping and clapping. He sat perfectly still wondering if he had seen what he thought he had seen. Of all the exotic dancers in this city he had watched over the years, he had never experienced such a loss when she left his sight to disappear behind the curtains.

“My God,” he breathed. “Jesus Jumping Christ.” Who and what was Shadow? A miracle of some sort, that's all she could be. An Eve walking the depths of the underbelly of the entertainment world. Was she real?

He gulped down the Irish coffee and ordered another. He sat at the table, as did the rest of the audience, for the next four hours hoping to see Shadow again. He had to see her to be sure he had not been dreaming. But she did not dance another set and she did not wait the tables. They closed the place at two. Mitchell came out into the night with a stumble.

The dancers after Shadow were a blur, a distraction to him. He had drunk way too many whiskeys and coffee. He was, by Jiminy and glory be, drunk as a goddamned skunk, hey, hey, whatta you say?

He called for a cab from the corner phone booth, knowing it was going to be a bitch to come down here on a Sunday morning to pick up his car.

At home, he had to fiddle with the door and the key for ten minutes to make anything work. Pavlov almost knocked him down, butted his legs, whacked him with his back end, and Mitchell didn't even scold him. The dog, a well-trained boxer who could hold his water longer than a camel, barked to go out. Mitchell said, “Shut up, you crazy mutt, I gotta get some sleep,” then promptly fell fully clothed onto the sofa.

After whining for a full five minutes to no avail, then sniffing at Mitchell's face before backing off at the scent of alcohol, Pavlov climbed onto the sofa and curled over his master's legs like a rumpled blanket.

He'd just have to hold on till morning.

 

Seven

 

She thought of herself as Shadow now. Kay? Katherine? That was another person in another life. Light years in the past. Buried in the graves of her children.

So when the manager, Bertram, called her back from the private exit door leading to the alley where her parked Toyota waited, she corrected him. “Call me Shadow,” she said. “That's my name.” She liked and adopted the name because Charlene had given it to her. It fit her like no other could.

“Yeah, that's what I meant to say, sure you're Shadow, sure, baby. That was some performance tonight! Had them with their tongues hanging out. Now you could do a little more shaking and stroking, you know what I mean, but essentially, you got what it takes. I knew that the first time I saw you. I can spot ‘em, don't think I can't. I ain't seen a crowd like this in years.”

“Let me do it my way or I don't do it,” she said, pushing open the door. “And since the boys liked me so well, I expect another fifty dollars a week.”

“Now hold on one goddamn minute, I never said . . .”

“Fifty. Or I walk.” She sucked in the night air, smiling to herself, glad to be out of the smoke-filled atmosphere of the club. Cheap perfume. Sweat. Stink.

Bottom of the barrel stink. Some people said they loved humanity. What was there to love, but the stink of them? Pawing, fawning sons of bitches, the whole lot. Men. They brought misery and pain and left behind bad tastes in the mouth and memories that broke your heart.

She was glad they hadn't known, though, how scared she was out on the stage. It was her second performance and she'd had to psyche herself but good to go out on that garishly lighted stage wearing what she wouldn't be caught dead wearing at home. In her real life. It was nothing like the dancing she had done before in the elegant atmosphere at Babe's. That was a class place that attracted the class clientele. The Hot Spot was about a hundred levels below Babe's, down there in the stink, floating like scum in the swill. She had tried the better places, but despite her workouts and muscle tone, despite her new stylish cut that let her black glistening hair swing free around her face and shoulders, they thought they just couldn't use her, sorry. She was one helluva nice looking woman, though, they'd say that for her.